Looking down upon the city from the east, John Howard Payne, in tranquil contentment, on his return from a sojourn in a foreign land, wrote the one song which will never die, “Home, Sweet Home.”
In isolated serenity in Rock Creek Park stands the cabin of Joaquin Miller, “the poet of the Sierras,” now the shrine of the artist as well as the writer.
Across Lafayette Park, opposite the White House, George Bancroft, the great historian, calmly laid down his pen in his 91st year and passed to his great reward.
And it was here that the painter James McNeill Whistler began his climb to an artistic, world-renowned fame.
As for science, why Washington is the scientific center of the world. More revolutionary discoveries which have been the foundations of great industries have been made in the District of Columbia than any other ten miles square in all the world.
It was here that the great Joseph Henry spent the most prolific period of his sixty years of usefulness.
On the bosom of Rock Creek, Fulton first floated the model of his steamboat, the Clermont; and on the Potomac River, Professor Langley tested out the aerodynamic principles upon which all airplanes are built, and at a time when the “flying machine” was a subject not mentioned in elite scientific circles.
In the observatory on Cathedral Heights, that great astronomer, Simon Newcomb, worked; and nearby Cleveland Abbe, the famous meteorologist, published the first daily weather reports.
Between Washington and Baltimore, Professor S. F. B. Morse, in 1844, put his telegraph to work, the first telegraph operator being Theodore N. Vail, late president of the A. T. & T. Company. Dr. Graham Bell perfected his telephone here, Professor Tainter the wax cylinder phonograph, and Mr. Berliner the talking machine.
Both the typecasting machines, the linotype and monotype, were invented in the District; and here a stenographer in the Life Saving Service invented the first motion picture machine, the prototype of the projector used in every picture theatre the world over to this very day.